Cilium

Cilium, developed by Isovalent, is an open-source solution that aims to provide secure and observable network connectivity for container and cloud-native workloads. According to the vendor, Cilium leverages the kernel technology eBPF to deliver advanced networking capabilities, including load balancing, traffic management, and bandwidth optimization. It also enables secure connectivity through zero-trust network segmentation and identity-based enforcement. Additionally, Cilium offers insights into network flows, metrics, and visualizations for troubleshooting and monitoring purposes.

Key Features

According to the vendor, Cilium excels in Kubernetes networking, ensuring seamless connectivity between pods and services within the cluster. It offers features such as service discovery, multi-cluster connectivity, and integration with legacy infrastructure, including load balancing, BGP, and static egress gateway.

Cilium aims to simplify cluster hardening by providing advanced security features like transparent encryption, zero-trust network segmentation, and SIEM integration for forensics and compliance. According to the vendor, it enables compliance monitoring, historical data analytics, and runtime protection to make security decisions based on data.

According to the vendor, Cilium serves as the default Container Networking Interface (CNI) for leading cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure, ensuring consistent networking across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. It facilitates connectivity between Kubernetes clusters across multiple clouds and hybrid clouds, as well as linking them with legacy environments for business-critical applications. Cilium also claims to offer application monitoring, L7 observability, and protocol transparency for multi-cloud deployments.